


The Soft Star-Shine at Night

by Margo_Kim



Category: Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Bittersweet, Dreams, F/M, Gen, Ghosts, Nightmares
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-20
Updated: 2012-10-20
Packaged: 2017-11-16 17:22:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,259
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/541953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/pseuds/Margo_Kim
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the Avengers kinkmeme: "Tony is having a nightmare. A really, really bad nightmare. So bad, he starts calling out for Yinsen in his sleep. Yinsen answers."</p><p>Yinsen did not sleep or eat or tire. He crossed the span of the globe in a night. He haunted the shadows of his childhood home and saw it true for the first time. He spirited across warzones and helped the angels untangle the dead from their bodies. Even war was beautiful now, in the way that a polluted sky makes the sunset all the richer. At night, he visited cities and watched the symphony of dreams above the towering glass and metal.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Soft Star-Shine at Night

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Mary Frye's poem, "Do Not Stand at my Grave and Weep." 
> 
> Beta'd by [Ias](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Ias).

_Don’t sleep, don’t sleep, don’t sleep, until—_

_Sand. Sand and darkness and the crushing weight on his chest—what is it? What’s here? Why does it hurt? What’s happening? But no time for questions now because the water is here, pressing down and around and filling and choking and the darkness darkness darkness and when he vomits it back up it tastes like battery acid and blood_

_He will die here he will die in this cave in this hole in the ground in this country he helped maul he will die at the hands of monsters he armed and when he dies no one will cry no one at all because there will be rejoicing in the street there will be parades and celebrations because the monster at last is dead_

***

The afterlife was not what Yinsen expected.

For one, he thought death would be somewhat final. 

“What, you wanted to end?” Sun said. 

“No, no,” he said. “I wanted to see you. All other ideas were fancies and idle fears.” 

Yinsen had never been a man of poetry, a lack he felt keenly now as he looked for the words to describe his wife. Like sunlight through a painted window. Like petals in the summer wind. Shapeless, formless, flawless, in death she wrapped herself around Yinsen and inside of him, curling up in the flowing essence of what was left of him when you scrubbed the flesh away. He supposed he must look beautiful as well. Most people were, when you got to the core of them. 

“But still,” he said, “I never expected to linger.” 

Though she had no hands and he had no heart, she pressed her hands against his heart. “Perhaps neither of us are ready to leave.”

He did not sleep or eat or tire. He crossed the span of the globe in a night. He haunted the shadows of his childhood home and saw it true for the first time. He spirited across warzones and helped the angels untangle the dead from their bodies. Even war was beautiful now, in the way that a polluted sky makes the sunset all the richer. At night, he visited cities and watched the symphony of dreams above the towering glass and metal.

***

_He deserves this_

_That’s the sick part_

_He deserves this_

_and more_

_and worse_

_because he’s seen the truth_

_His eyes have been opened_

_His eyelids have been ripped off_

***

“Are you an angel?” his niece asked. She had been a baby when he was taken, and in the intervening years, she had seen her parents and her brothers and her sister die in red bursts and black smoke. On the worst nights, when the nightmares would not leave, he stepped inside her mind and swept the bodies away like dust.

“No,” he replied. “I certainly am not.” 

In the morning, she will forget that he came. She will only remember that she slept well, just this once. 

He was no angel. He had done too much in his life to have earned that honor. Kindness was a lesson he took too long to learn, and it had only come when all else was lost. He tried to practice it now in death, but the opportunities were limited and day by day bits of him seemed to blow away like dandelions in the wind. 

“I don’t imagine we’ll be here much longer,” he told his wife. She did not seem to hear him. All that was left of her in this world was a mute and dumb and blind mass of love. She had been dead so much longer than he had. The only reason any of her lingered was because he did. But he could not leave. Not yet. 

He had, cliché as it was, unfinished business on Earth.

***

_He will never leave this cave not really not even when he puts on his metal suit and flies away he left himself there next to the body of a man who died for him_

_His body feels heavier nowadays_

_It’s carrying two souls_

***

New York City was beautiful tonight. The city that never slept always overflowed with dreams. Tattered and battered, the city still swelled with hope. It had seen a hole ripped in the sky, and still it looked up with wonder. He had been here only once, as a young man with a young wife. The skyline had looked differently then. Now there were new gaps. And new buildings to fill them. He looked for the grandest. That was where he needs to be.

Stark Tower, it was once called. It had a new name now. Jutting proudly into the sky, the Avengers Tower was almost empty tonight. The employees of the lower section were asleep at home. The upper section glowed dimly with sleep. 

Yinsen took a breath—metaphorically speaking—and entered. And like he’d done since he first woke in from the sleep he had thought was eternal, he took the long way to his destination.

The assassin ran through an empty office building shouting a name she didn’t know, looking for something she couldn’t remember and wasn’t sure she wanted to find. 

The archer stared into clear blue eyes that stared back at him, and the guilt that claws at his stomach. He liked the way they looked. 

The soldier watched his friend fall and then, like his mind was tired of this dream, the scene changed to the summer where they snuck into the pool after it closed and pushed each other into the sun-heated water. 

The god pulled until his hands bleed and his muscles tore, but his hammer stayed put on his brother’s chest as it slowly crushed him to death. 

One bedroom over, two minds in one head had a pleasant conversation they could never have awake. Yinsen eavesdropped for a moment until the fiercer mind growled at him. 

And then he can avoid it no longer. The object of his search lay curled around the soft body of a sleeping woman. Her dreams were smooth as silk. His were sharp as shrapnel. For a moment, Yinsen considered being a coward. In all his journeys of the Earth in his new form, never once had he been tempted to return to the cave where he died. There were no epiphanies there that he hadn’t already had, no revelations that hadn’t been revealed. There was wisdom to be found in pain, true, but sometimes there was just pain. 

But he could not turn and go, no more than he could turn the Earth back and back and time along with it until he was living and back in that cave with this man in his cot, his chest bloody and open before him. From the moment they met, Yinsen and this man were entwined. Death could not sever that. 

It was like swimming. 

First the breath. 

Then the plunge.

***

_“Hello, Tony.”_

_He knows this voice this hand this face this man. They were friends once or not friends but companions or not companions but brothers in arms._

_“I think you have something of mine,” Yinsen says._

_He knows. He has your life._

_Yinsen smiles as kindly as he can, though he is out of practice. It has been a long while since he has had a mouth. “No, Tony. That was a gift given freely, but one more for the benefit of the giver than the recipient.”_

_He is not listening. He cannot hear._

_“Do not panic, Tony. You’re safe. You left the cave long ago.”_

_“What do you know?” he says with a fat tongue swollen with blood. “You’re dead and I’m alive and that’s not fair.” Dreams are the one place where no one can lie. One can refuse to understand the truth, but one must always speak it. “You hate me.”_

_The truth, however, is only one truth. It can still be wrong._

_“No,” Yinsen says. “I have pitied you, I have resented you, I have liked you, I have helped you, and I have died for you. I have never hated you.”_

_And Tony believes him He has to. He knows how dreams work as well. Tony looks at him with tired resignation. “You should.”_

_“Don’t presume to tell me what I should or should not do, Tony. You’ve always been too bossy.”_

_The left half of Tony’s mouth twitches upwards and Yinsen feels tremendously rewarded. “I’m working on it.”_

_“You’re not surprised to see me,” Yinsen says. “Have I been here before?”_

_“Every night.”_

_Bang, bang, bang goes the door. Yinsen turns to look and sees the twisted faces of his torturers pressed against the small glass window. They snarl and howl. Their mouths are full of a thousand fangs, and the fangs are bullets, and the bullets bear the distinctive check of Stark Industries._

_“What will they do?” he asks._

_“Tear us limb from limb,” Tony replies. “If we’re lucky, I’ll wake before they finish.”_

_Men like Yinsen don’t believe in luck. From his pocket, he throws Tony something he has pilfered from other dreams in this sleepless city. Tony catches it with two hands cupped together, like he cradles a baby bird. A gold mask with burning eyes. “So many people dream about it,” Yinsen says. “It keeps them safe from their nightmares.”_

_He stares down at it. His knuckles whiten as he grips it. Dust shakes from the ceiling as the monsters pound at the door and howl. The ground beneath their feet starts to crumble and flake away. Through the holes, Yinsen can see the stars._

_“Every night,” Tony says. The mask glows and the mask melts, shining gold and red oozing in Tony’s hands. “And I’ve never managed to save you.”_

_And Yinsen says, “Maybe it’s time you did.”_

_Tony’s eyes are black and blank. His hands shake. His lips part. And then, and then—he smirks.”Damn good idea, Yinsen.” He looks at the mess in his hands, a man with a plan, and paints it across his face. He coats his body in the gold and the scarlet and though flesh should be sizzling, though he should be screaming, Tony has never looked so calm or so beautiful. And then the metal turns solid. Gold and scarlet and godlike, the Iron Man is a bright figure in the pitch black room. The arc reactor burns like the sun._

_Iron Man raises his hands to the door. They burn white with fire. “Have I ever said thank you?” he asks._

_“I believe I died before you could.”_

_“Well. Thanks. I’ve tried to not waste it.”_

_Yinsen smiles and he realizes that a mouth is all that is left of him. That his hands and feet and legs and arms and chest and head and heart and soul are stardust floating in the air around him, that he is as large as a galaxy right now and small as an atom, that he is blowing away like sand in the wind and his wife is blowing away with him as he uncurls his fingers, his stardust fingers, from the last bond that bound him to Earth._

_“Sleep well, Tony Stark,” he says and then he says nothing ever again._

***

Tony woke early that morning. He woke before even Pepper for once, snuggled into the bed next, her hair fanned out on the pillow like a red nebula. That would make her freckles the stars. She shifted as he traced constellations with his fingertips. “Tony?” she asked half-asleep. “Did you have another nightmare?” He was silent long enough that she opened her eyes and rubbed the sleep out of them. “What happened?”

He kissed the bridge of her nose. “Go back to sleep,” Tony said. “I’m fine.”

She bumped her nose against his. “Are you sure?”

In the early morning, before they remembered to be prickly, affection was easy, and there was no better place in the whole world for him to put his hand than the dip of her waist. 

“I’m Tony Stark, Pep. I’m always sure.” 

Pepper nestled her head deeper into the pillow and snorted. “Being sure is not the same as being right.”

“I’m always right.” 

Her half-open eyes had been propped open by concern, and now they were fully closed, concern assuaged. Tony pulled her closer to him, until her head rested on his shoulder, her leg rested on his leg, her hand rested on the arc reactor, and he knew she could feel its thrum as she drifted back off to sleep. “You ass,” she mumbled into his shoulder. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“I’m okay,” he said, but she was already asleep which was fortunate because she might have asked if he was lying and Tony didn’t know how to answer that. He was. He wasn’t. He was lying less than he normally would. There was a dream he couldn’t remember. When he closed his eyes he saw something like stars bursting in the dark and a mouth quirking upwards. Afterimages, burned and fading. It was hard to breathe with Pepper’s weight on his chest, but he didn’t want to move her. He never wanted her to move. _I’m falling asleep too_ , he thought. _Alright._ He covered Pepper’s hand with his and blocked out the pale blue light. _So I’m falling asleep._ Tony had faced worse things than a full night’s rest.

“Good night,” he murmured to no one at all, and he was asleep before he could be disappointed that no one responded.


End file.
